Originally posted by AlphaGAK20D Thanks, Chris. I'm using LR Beta 4 right now for post, so Fill Light is no longer an implicit option, but I really did very little post using LR anyway; instead, I've been taking Nik Color Efex Pro 4 for a test drive and used it for most of the heavy lifting. As you correctly implied, the side of the train facing me was shaded and to get light back on it/the grass, I used a filter in Color Efex called "Reflector Efex" - essentially a virtual reflector - gold, soft gold, or silver - for the subject at hand. A number of other filters exist and you can mix them as you want to achieve myriad results and save the mix, if you like it, as a recipe. I use Nik Silver Efex for many of my BW conversions and so far I'm loving Color Efex.
Oh I am quite familiar with Color Efex; I love Nik's software. ;-)
Though, I only have the "Select" version, which doesn't have that filter.
Anyway, I saw somewhere in this thread or elsewhere on the forum some talk about a command line HDR-capable program called "Enfuse". I finally tracked it down and played with it today. I've been much too cheap to buy Photomatix because I've never produced results in the trial version that made me think a purchase was worthy. I have to say after 30 minutes of fiddling with the free Enfuse, I may have found a way to finally start processing all these bracketed exposures I've never bothered combining to HDR. The results are very natural.
Here is a 3-exposure HDR composite of a subject from a couple months ago with default settings brought into Photoshop and adjusted with Color Efex:
Nothing special, but I can tell there will be more to come.